The Wise Fool Digest for February 18

That Didn't Work, Time for Something New edition

Hey there and welcome to your weekly Wise Fool Digest… because sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be foolishness, and what looked foolish turns out to be pretty wise. I think that’s the theme of this week’s gleanings.

New Industry, New economic growth? Not so much.

From the Ohio River Valley Institute

A new think tank called the Ohio River Valley Institute put out a report this week that documents how fracking (an often-controversial method for extracting natural gas) has failed to generate the jobs, income or population growth that supporters claimed it would create.

The study focuses on two areas called the Marcellus and Utica gas fields, locatedin eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. According to the study, 2010-era economic impact studies projected over 450,000 new jobs over the following decade, but instead the region barely gained anything in terms of total jobs and declined against the rest of the U.S. on a variety of measures that should have been …